Your Website Strategy Resource

This blog will give you many examples of ways to strategize your marketing efforts through your website or via several websites. It is no secret that just having a website out there in the virtual space simply isn’t enough any more when it comes to selling or promoting products, services, or advertising your business. With more competing products and vendors on the Internet, you need to sift through various tactics for getting your website known to as many people as possible in the shortest possible time frame.

First of all, you want to determine the purpose of your website. Is it a blog that promotes guest posting? Is it a site based on a hot topic? Are you selling a product or a service? Are you selling both?

Secondly, you need to have an idea of how big your audience or market is and who your competitors are. How exploited is your niche? Keep in mind that, the more specialized you are, the easier it will be to focus your efforts on a specific market segment that will consistently want to hear or buy from you.

Third, will you be focusing on traffic (meaning visitors to your website), conversions (a visitor submitting an e-email address or clicking a “Buy” button to purchase what you offer), or both? You will need different strategies to accomplish these different goals.

People who operate successful blogs that bring them 4-5 figures per month in revenue, will tell you that it is truly desirable to have an automated system in place so that the buying process takes place on a continued basis.

You will also have to consider doing certain things differently from your competition, in an attractive way that is, in order to distinguish yourself form the rest of the crowd. Not an easy task. However, the more you know about your competition, the better you will be able to take a direction that no one else has taken yet.

We are a small group of internet marketers who use best working strategies based on personal experience and constant studying of our competition. We like selling our own physical and digital products online, as well as promoting other people’s products, also known as affiliate marketing.

As stated above, this site will provide some good insights on website marketing that you can utilize with your own products and also if you have a small local business, it works either way if done properly and consistently. Even if you have a hobby and want to attract a big audience to your website and show people what you do, the content you’ll find here will be helpful to you. As stated in our About and Contact pages, we welcome guest posting on relevant topics. Thank you for visiting our blog! Content will be added gradually to ensure quality.

When trying to make your new website easier for people to find, you need to determine what terms or phrases, also known as keywords, your targeted market would search for to solve their particular problem or need. Always remember that, even in a very narrowly targeted group, there could be several different needs, each of which could be expressed somewhat differently. Find out what the most searched keywords are, then find variations of these keywords and look in the Google Keyword Planner to get an estimate of the related search volumes. Keep in mind that the keyword planner will give you a very basic idea. You will see what everyone else sees, right?

From the basic picture that the planner reveals, you then need to come up with more variations that still belong to your target market yet don’t readily show in the planner. Type those in and see what the search volumes and competition are. Explore the ideas that Google gives you. Then add a third layer of search, ask yourself the question, what else your audience would like to read about. This is where things get really interesting because you will realize that there is a massive amount of keywords that your potential buyers type into Google, yet you don’t see those in the Keyword Planner.

Why is this important? Well, it matters because you don’t want to optimize for the terms that everyone and their mother is targeting. There are only ten spots on page 1 of Google. Therefore, you need to strategize your optimization around less exploited yet very powerful keywords. Keep in mind that Google will not reveal these keywords to you unless you use your brain somewhat creatively. This is because they make billions upon billions of dollars per year from advertising on their paid platform called Adwords. They are not interested in you ranking your website organically. However, the Internet is a user experience-based network and it will distinguish sites that provide value to its users. Below is a great video on keyword research:

Study your target market well and find out what your users are actually typing into the search engines to find your competition. Then go after these keywords in your optimization process. Think about it this way: is it worth paying thousands per month on SEO to rank for one or two super competitive search terms, or is it much better to rank for 25 terms that users type on a daily basis? How frequently would your website pop on page 1 of Google if you go after two terms, versus how frequently would your site show in page 1 if it supports 25 highly searched but less known to your competition, keywords?

If you are new to this whole keyword research concept, take some time to think it through and don’t rush into making decisions before you have explored your options carefully. The more you dig into the terms, the more overwhelming you may get, but keep a written log so you don’t have to go back in your search and try to remember what you typed ten minutes ago that gave you some promising numbers but you didn’t take a note of it.

With more experience, you will do all this before you even build a new website. However, you can accomplish great rankings with an already existing site if you position your keywords contextually into your content. Remember, as we discussed in the last post, to use unique content with great quality information.

One last note, also remember that, even if your site ranks on the top of page 1 of Google, if it so happens that nobody clicks on your site and you get no conversions whatsoever, you will have the rethink your keyword choices. Yes, it ranked for X, Y and Z keywords, but apparently nobody is really searching for those at this time. What else could they be searching for? The more questions you ask, the more you will learn by finding your answers and acting on them.

Another excellent way to find buyers’ keywords is to go to online forums that your targeted audience hangs on, and ask them directly what they type into Google when they need A, B or C, just insert the services or products you provide and watch for the answers. We bet you that you will learn from your potential buyers much more than on any optimization forum.

Due to the popularity that our original Website Content post got, and because several people have requested more elaboration on the subject, we decided to continue our discussion on content here in this post.

There are many ways to generate content. Currently, there is a big trend to buy article-creating software that allows users to enter a specific keyword or topic in an assigned field, and let it generate articles. The more sophisticated software types have more topics and subtopics, and they let you choose article length such as 300, 400, 500, 1000 words etc. The premise behind the idea of automated content generation is saving the user money and time. It saves money because it can be quite expensive to hire a professional writer who will do the necessary topic research and write good articles. With the software, you can sign up for a year or on a monthly basis.Content software also saves time because it produces an article in a matter of seconds. The alternative is to spend anywhere between half and hour to several hours of your time writing an article, depending on the complexity of your subject.

These are the benefits of content generating software. Now, let’s look at the disadvantages. A fast article-generating software scrapes sentences from all over the Internet and puts them into sequences that make sense, forming paragraphs that fill your article. There is no specific form such as an essay where you start from listing the issues you are about to discuss, then addressing each issue in a separate paragraph, and then concluding or summarizing on what you just discussed. In a software generated article, you can basically put each paragraph wherever you’d like, and the article will still deliver the same message. You can also move sentences within each paragraph without affecting it much.

Duplicate content is a massive problem with article creating software. Google has a specific penalty called Panda that affects websites with content that has been copied from other websites. Therefore, when generating an article with a software, you need to check it for duplicate content and replace the repeating text with different text. This makes the process somewhat time-consuming again. Make sure the article is readable. Some software versions produce completely unreadable text that nobody should ever publish on their website.

Hiring a good author to write your articles will not always guarantee uniqueness of the text, as there have been many cases when people have paid someone to write articles for their websites only to find out later that the websites were hit by Google for duplicate content. It is your responsibility to check each piece of content that you have not written yourself, for possible duplications. If you see several times that the content your author gave you is truly unique, then you know you have found a resource that is worth your trust and money.

Website Traffic

The higher the number of people that see/visit your website and the longer they stay on it, the better your chances of bringing your goals to realization. There are various ways to bring people to see your new site, such as:

Word of mouth. Tell everyone you know about your site, what it is about, and encourage them to tell their friends, too.

If you already have an email list, send the appropriate messages to the people in your list who would be interested in what your site has to offer.

Another great tactic is to put the site’s URL on as many Internet platforms as possible. Social media are excellent places to start. If you have many friends or followers on different social media, you can rest assured that these people will see the postings related to your newly created website. Again, don’t forget to request that your friends share these postings in their circles and ask their friends to share further.

Business cards are still relevant as many people who could turn into customers or clients still prefer to collect a business card rather than visiting a website first. Make sure your website URL is clearly printed on your business card.

The same applies to any flyers, brochures, direct mail, etc.

You can run a paid ad in the local newspaper announcing your new venue, accompanied by your website URL.

Make a video and include the site’s URL in it. Spread the video on social media or email it to your list.

Alternatively, use Google’s paid advertising platform called AdWords. Keep in mind, however, that this method requires you to pay for a particular number of clicks on your website. In other words, when visitors click on the link to see it, Google charges you money based on a predetermined monthly budget, regardless of whether or not these visitors end up becoming your clients or customers (also known as conversion, to be discussed in our next post). Depending on the competition of the keywords for which you desire to be found on the first page of Google, pay per click (or PCP) can be quite expensive.

If you have a bigger budget, you may want to hire a professional marketing expert to promote your products or services, in which case the marketing materials will most likely include your website URL.

In some cases Google will help you with your site’s ranking if it turns out to be really popular or viral. You will know that the website is popular if

It has consistent or increasing number of monthly visitors (you can check for free in the Control Panel of your website hosting service), or

Owners of other sites like your site so much that they decide to link their sites to your site.

Many people make the mistake of relying only on one or two of these tactics. The best results come in when you implement all of the above tactics in order to compound their effects and create massive amounts of traffic to your website. We are not saying that there aren’t specific tactics that work better than others in certain situations. If you happen to find that one particular approach is more effective than the others, by all means focus your efforts and resources on that particular approach. However, more often than not, it is better to keep your eggs in more than one basket. Therefore, it is a good idea to make yourself visible to more people from different places on and off the Internet.

Making a website can be a very fast or quite a time-consuming process, depending on your goals and experience. There are several components in the creation of any website. Domain, hosting, setup, design, content, navigation, and optimization are the first steps that come to mind. There are extensive courses dedicated to each of these components, with varying degrees of detail, quality and pricing. You should buy at least two or three (they tend to complement each other usually), to get a full grasp of all the possibilities out there. It is a serious investment that is worth it if you want to make a living out of building, designing and optimizing websites.

However, if your goal is to have a website to promote a product or a service when timing is of the essence, you will be better off from a timing perspective to invest in a website-building service. There are many designers that can easily implement any site theme and improve the appearance once you show them some websites that you like. We are mentioning design here because we’ve found that many people are quite concerned with the way their site looks. There are in fact other elements that are significantly more essential to the traffic and conversion of a website, but we’ll discuss those in later posts.

While it is true that custom design prices can vary anywhere from $200 to $100,000, depending on how complex your vision is on navigation, and how big a website you want, a professional designer can make your website look truly unique and give it a very special character. On the other hand, there are cheaper yet very efficient solutions such as professionally made website templates that incorporate excellent optimization features right from the start. If you go to a service like WWW.OfflineNeo.com, you can see how some firms offer a wider variety of services than others. OFFLINE NEO business websites include options for template or custom, depending on your budget. Some templates can be easily adjusted, to match the colors of any business logo. This is also a form of customization but it takes much less work than building a completely customized website from scratch, therefore it is more cost-efficient. If you are just starting a business and don’t have a big marketing budget to spend on a custom designed website, using a predesigned template is a great strategy. Your site will end up looking very professional, it will have all the necessary components to bring across your business message to your visitors as well as the essential information about your products or services, yet it won’t cost you an arm and a leg. You will also be able to insert any pictures of yourself, your business, your staff, as well as videos that would give your new visitors an idea of what to expect when they first show up at your door.

Now that we have discussed the very basics of website strategy, we’ll next move on to the more sophisticated aspects of planning your website’s performance in terms of traffic and conversion. Again, it all depends on what you want to accomplish through your website, but in our experience, it is safe to assume that you would like A) visitors, and B) action that leads to some kind of a change, such as influencing the opinions of others, or gaining some type of profit.

Content creation for a website has proven to be a serious challenge for many marketers or business owners as less and less people nowadays take the time to build their vocabulary and learn proper spelling through consistent reading, which is how it used to be two generations ago. You can find all types of written content on the Internet and discover how severely literacy has decreased in recent years. If your spelling, grammar, (or both) are not great and you know it, it is in your best interest to hire someone with good writing skills to manage your website content for you. Your website needs to look professional in order for you to be able to distinguish yourself and your business from your competition.

Spelling and grammar mistakes tend to stir people away from websites, especially when it comes to making business/buying decisions, i.e, decisions that would ultimately result in people separating themselves from their money.

To prevent this from happening, especially if your daily bread will depend on how well your offers convert through your website, hire a professional if you are feeling uncomfortable at your current writing level. After all, you can’t be an expert in everything, and it is crucial to recognize when you could use some help. The content of your website presents you and your business to those who have never heard about you before. Make it a great first impression!